


Babochka

by MortemGrimalkinMessor



Category: Guardians of Childhood - William Joyce, Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Angst, Broke-It, Dubious Consent, Except I Didn’t Fix It, Fearlings, Fix-It, Golden Army - Freeform, Jack Frost Is A Damn Sass Master, Jack Meets Kozmotis, Memory Alteration, Multi, Nightmares, Poor Jack, Poor Jack Frost, Possession, Really It’s Not, Sandy Is A Dad Friend, Time Travel, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, YES I NEED THAT ONE TWICE, canon but not, mmm darkness doesn’t give a shit about your feelings, touch starvation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-29
Packaged: 2019-09-25 10:33:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17119709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MortemGrimalkinMessor/pseuds/MortemGrimalkinMessor
Summary: After the defeat of the Nightmare King, Pitch Black, Jack gets used to life as a guardian. But he’s still curious about the events that led up to it: who was Pitch? Why was he so set on taking over the world? Why was he the way that he was? Well, Manny decides that this time, Jack deserves answers. Even if those answers have disastrous consequences.





	Babochka

“To the left, kid, keep up!” Jack crowed as he urged Jamie’s sled faster down its path through the trees. Jamie shrieked as he was spun around a sharp turn and down into a loop.

“Jack, where are we going?” Jamie hollered over the sound of wind rushing in his ears. 

“Wherever the wind takes us!” Jack called back with a laugh.

Or, that would’ve been the plan, had Jamie’s sled not decided that it’d had enough of being slung around, and broke with a resonating _crack_. Jamie yelped as his sled abruptly slumped to the left, the metal blade left behind on the ice track. Jack looked back, his eyes widened, and he hastily curved out the ice so that Jamie skidded off of it and landed harmlessly in a snow drift next a bare patch of earth.

The leg of the sled that had broken off soared off the track as well, whistled through the air near Jack’s hovering feet, and struck into the ground with a resonating _thwong_. It warbled back and forth for a moment, before Jack stilled it with the tip of his staff. Frost spiralled down the rusty metal in pretty patterns.

Jack looked over at the disturbed mound of snow to his left with a wince. “You okay, Jamie?”

There was a muffled reply, and then Jamie’s grinning visage popped up out of the snow. He shook his head to dislodge the flakes still nestled in his toboggan. “I think I need a new sled.”

“You think?” Jack laughed, relieved. He floated closer and helped Jamie unstick his now useless sled from the drift.

“Hey, Jack, where are we?”

Jamie’s voice sounded a bit off, but Jack wasn’t paying attention. “Somewhere around the pond, I think. A little past it, probably. Why?”

“Isn’t this where…” Jamie trailed off, and Jack looked up in confusion to see him pointing at the bare patch of dirt next them. Snow covered boards of wood lay all around it, a bit of headboard strewn next to a tree.

Jack went still.

He left the sled next to his ice track and floated forward, grip on his staff gone white-knuckled. Squinting suspiciously at the ground, he reached down and touched it with his toes. It crumbled beneath them, and Jack hurriedly scrambled backward. But nothing happened.

Brows furrowed, Jack hesitantly went closer once more. The dirt had fallen away where he’d touched it, but otherwise it seemed intact, if a bit spotty. The darkness beneath was yawning, impenetrable. He shuddered.

He flew quickly back and hiked up Jamie’s sled. “C’mon Jamie, let’s get out of here.”

The brunet gnawed on his lip with his gapped teeth and slowly followed after Jack. “...Can we make a snowman since my sled broke?”

“Buddy, I could make you an _army_ of snowmen, if you wanted.” Jack grinned down at him.

“Yeah! With top hats!”

“And carrot noses! I stole a bag last time I visited North.”

“Oh, what about the buttons?”

Jack shrugged and winked. “We’ll figure it out.”

Jamie beamed up at him, and Jack didn’t think of the crumbling entrance to Pitch’s lair again.

 

•❄️•

 

Jack flopped down on the topmost boughs of his favorite pine tree, exhausted. Jamie had run him ragged almost all day, but Jack couldn’t find it in him to complain. His still felt an inexplicable warmth blossom within his chest whenever Jamie grabbed his hand or hugged him or pulled on his hoodie. It felt nice to be seen.

Blue eyes blinked up at the sky, clear of clouds tonight, as the thin, distant tendrils of Sandy’s dreams began to snake across the sky.

Unwittingly, Jack’s mind wandered back to that morning, when he and Jamie had stumbled upon Pitch’s sealed up caves. Well, obviously not so ‘sealed up’ anymore.

Jack recalled how he’d chased Pitch’s shadow across the labyrinth of stairs and walkways as the man had dug around in Jack’s greatest fears, slowly taking him apart with words until Jack was so distracted that Pitch finished his move on Easter.

Rolling over on his branch, Jack shook his head and frowned. Well, he wouldn’t be getting any sleep _now_. He sat up, grabbed his staff, and flew up and over towards the field where he and Jamie had made snowmen earlier. It was glistening with little white footprints, softened by another inch of fresh power. In the middle sat seven and a half snowmen in varying stages of build and decay.

There were a few that looked like normal snowmen, of course, but a few had lost heads or melted halfway and then frozen again once the sun had gone down. It left them lopsided, deformed.

Jack swooped down and perched lightly on top of his favorite one—the tallest, with a crown made out of crooked holly twigs. The wind blustered under the sleeves of his hoodie playfully as he spread out his arms for balance and walked laps around the tips of the stick-crown. 

A cloud passed above, blocking out the light for a moment. Jack tensed, didn’t dare breathe until the clouds had moved and the light was back. Licking his lips, Jack tilted his head slowly back and locked his eyes onto the Moon. Frost curled anxiously on his staff. He bit his lip.

“Hi.” He finally managed after a moment, awkward and a bit strangled. 

Things with the Man in the Moon had always been complicated. Less so after becoming a Guardian, Jack had thought, but it turned out that becoming a Guardian didn’t just magically solve all of his problems. Feelings like abandonment, uselessness, betrayal, helplessness, desolation; after about three centuries of stewing in them, they didn’t just...go away. It wasn’t like the Man in the Moon had ever actually answered him directly. He had been told his name was Jack Frost. That was it. Occasionally there would be faint inklings, like distant emotions, a nudge in a certain direction, an urge to do something he normally wouldn’t. But that was very hard to call that ‘communication’.

Jack swallowed and knocked the crook of his staff into the holly branches. Icicles cracked out from between them, like little, spiky, crown jewels. “We haven’t talked in a while. Well, _I_ haven’t talked to _you_ in awhile. Don’t know why I’m doing it now, if I’m honest. I guess I’m just,” Jack blew out a breath and ran his hand through his wild hair. “Curious.”

The world around him abruptly sharpened, and a slight flicker of indulgence flitted through his chest. Jack tightened his jaw and clutched his staff with both hands. It felt like the Moon was listening. 

Maybe he always listened, and just didn’t care, or didn’t bother to answer. But this felt different. 

A flash of old bitterness stung Jack’s ribs for a moment—‘ _Really? Now?_ ’—before he shrugged it off and focused on the task at hand. What that task was however, he wasn’t sure he really knew.

“If we protect the children from Pitch, then why do we even need him? Who made him? Did you make him? I mean, that sounds kinda counterproductive, but hey…” Jack trailed off, uncomfortable. He shifted from foot to foot absently. “What I mean is—I know there has to be fear in the world, I know that, I _do_. But why does there have to be someone for it? I mean, it’s not like there’s a guardian of sadness, and we still have that, so it’s not like there needs to be an actual _person_ for it, right? Why bridge that gap? Why make it so dangerous? And why—” Jack’s breath hitched and cut himself off abruptly. 

‘ _Why make him so much like me?_ ’

He couldn’t ask that. He wouldn’t. Because, in the end, Jack wasn’t anything like Pitch. Jack had chosen the right side. He didn’t want to force people to see him, or love him, or believe in him. That was the difference between him and Pitch. Jack believed in people’s right to choose, their free will. And Pitch clearly did not.

But that desperation, that...loneliness.

Not that deep down, if Jack stopped denying it for a minute and let himself _feel_ , he pitied Pitch. To be alone for so long that you just stopped caring, well, even Jack’d had his moments.

Jack had constantly felt like he was balancing on a precipice of wanting people to see him, and _making_ people see him. Had Jack been just a bit more inclined, a bit more bitter, he would have taken Pitch’s offer in Antarctica. It made his stomach twist to think of it now, but the truth was that he would have. He understood what it felt like to feel the way Pitch had felt. Sometimes he thought of the Nightmare King, down there in his caves, all alone with only his Nightmares and Shadows to talk to (and Jack didn’t imagine they were compelling company), and didn’t feel vindication, or anger, or satisfaction. He just felt that choking, overwhelming _sympathy_.

Shaking strands of white out of his vision, Jack took a shaky breath and banished those thoughts from his mind. “I get that I ask you a lot of questions, but I need to know. I’ve tried asking the others, but they won’t talk to me. Or, well, Sandy tries to, but I can’t understand him half the time.” He gazed up at the moon, feeling raw and exposed. “Am I...bad, for wanting to know him? For feeling sorry for him? For understanding him? Is that wrong? Am I wrong?” The tone lilted up at the end, desperate, searching.

Jack stood tensed on the tips of his toes for a long time, but no answer came. After so many years of silence, he thought the crushing weight of disappoint would have faded, but he just thought that, since he was Guardian now, that maybe the Man in the Moon _had_ to answer him. That maybe he would _want_ to.

But apparently not.

Pursing his lips, Jack rocked back onto his heels. He rasped out a breathy, humorless laugh, and hopped up onto the winds. “Yeah. I don’t know what I was expecting.”

It wasn’t angry. No, Jack wasn’t as angry at the Moon as he had been. He wasn’t angry, he was just...tired. Very tired. Frustration and exhaustion did not make a very good combination, however. So Jack hopped up on the winds and turned away from the Moon.

He flew away, back to his tree before he could say something that he would later regret. He left to go try and sleep some more, leaving a very frosty snowman behind him.


End file.
